Now at the age of 17, he is working in a theatre group and
has performed several times in public. In one of these plays,
he sang “Singing in the rain” in English while the rest of the
play was in Galician or Spanish. My conclusion is that
children learn their “mother tongue” as a matter of survival,
because they (and we) are still animals. They soon learn the
sounds that the people around them make and they imitate.
It’s a matter of adaptation to their environment to achieve

survival in the way of food, clothing, warmth, affection,
social acceptance, etc. so it should not come as a surprise to
us bilingual parents when we find, much to our frustration,
that they have some kind of refusal to speak a language not
spoken by most of the people surrounding them. Small but
not stupid! Picking up the mother tongue, or a second
language or a third is no sign of a talent for languages. But it
does mean that they are adapting to social conditioning,
which basically is a matter of pure survival, for our
offspring and for all of us. On a final note, I am convinced
that having three languages in his thought patterns has
helped him no end to be good at other school subjects,
including sciences, as well as giving a broader outlook on
life.
Interesting comments here:
(http://www.brainskills.co.uk/GrowingUpBilingual.html)
The German philosopher Goethe said that “The person who
Encontré unos comentarios interesantes aquí:
knows only one language does not truly know that
language”
(http://www.brainskills.co.uk/GrowingUpBilingual.html)
In immigrant families, a child may learn only the minority
language at home. They may become fully bilingual after El filósofo Goethe dijo: “La persona que solamente conoce
they start school and learn the majority language. But a
un idioma no conoce realmente ese idioma”.
common historical phenomenon is that such children later
forget the minority language, or retain only a receptive
En el caso de las familias inmigrantes, puede que el niño
understanding, without full speaking fluency. There may be solamente aprenda el idioma minoritario en casa. Es posible
many complex psychological and social reasons, such as
que se haga plenamente bilingüe una vez que empiece en la
embarrassment at feeling different from peers. Yet in many escuela y aprenda el idioma mayoritario. Pero un fenómeno
parts of the world, such as Scandinavia, Switzerland and
histórico corriente es que estos niños se olvidan, más
India, multilingualism is universal and is promoted naturally adelante, del idioma minoritario, o retienen solamente una
both in homes and school systems from an early age.
comprensión receptiva, sin una total fluidez en el habla.
Podrían existir muchos y muy complejos motivos
psicológicos y sociales, tales como la vergüenza al sentirse
diferente ante sus semejantes. Sin embargo, en muchas
partes del mundo, tales como Escandinavia, Suiza o la India,
el multilingüismo es universal y se fomenta, de manera
natural, tanto en el hogar como en los sistemas educativos,
desde una temprana edad.

Being bilingual actually seems to structurally change the
brain. Intellect is related to the density of the brain’s grey
matter and brain imaging studies show that bilingual people
have denser grey matter than monolinguals. The differences
are most pronounced in the area of the left brain that
controls language, but a similar trend is seen in the right
hemisphere. The effect is more obvious the earlier that a
second language was learned.

A brain scanning technique called functional magnetic
resonance imaging has been used to study changes in the
blood flow of bilinguals while they name objects or describe
events in different languages. People who were bilingual
from an early age rely on the same critical patch of brain
aprendiera el segundo idioma.
cells for both languages. Those who learned a second
language later in life recruit a different segment of the brain Se ha aplicado una técnica de escaneo cerebral, denominado
for their second language. Apparently children use parts of la visualización mediante resonancia magnética funcional,
con el objeto de estudiar los cambios en el flujo sanguíneo

A scientist’s conclusions about the advantages for intelligence, learning and health

Prof. Miguel Martínez López University of Valencia, Spain
These are some his conclusions at this International Meeting held in Valencia, Spain, last December 2009:
Bilingües y políglotas: mayor densidad material gris (volumen-intelecto, especialmente áreas de memoria, atención, inteligencia y
capacidad de abstracción).
Bilinguals and polyglots: denser gray matter compared to monolinguals (volume-intellect, specially in areas of memory, attention,

Greater morphosyntactic and semantic awareness in language.
Mayor competencia lingïística en las áreas morfosintáctica y semántica.
Bilinguals have different frames of referente for concepts; different ways of looking at things in the world provided by the
different languages.
Los hablantes bilingües exhiben diferentes marcos de referencia conceptual, diferentes perspectivas de aproximación a la realidad
facilitadas por los distintos códigos lingüísticos.

Being fluent in 2 languages helps prevent some effects of aging on brain function, delaying 4-7 years the onset of dementia in
Alzheimer patients. The Canadian Alzheimer society estimates in 2000 Canada spent CAD 5.5 billion. In US over 100 billion p.a.
Using more than 1 language boosts blood supply to brain and ensures nerve connections remain healthy. Bilingual children
develop a mental agility monolinguals lack, perform cognitive tasks better, are more creative, better at problem-solving, score
higher on literacy tests and this intellectual ability transfers to study of 3rd & 4th languages.
Recommended book: (See Bialystok, 2007 & Laura-Ann Petitto, (2010) New Discoveries From the Bilingual Brain and Mind
Across the Life Span: Implications for Education. Mind, Brain, and Education3:4, 185-197 Online publication date: 1-Jan-2010.)
http://lists.becta.org.uk/pipermail/eal-bilingual/2003-November/002320.html
Highly proficient and early-exposed adult Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals participated. During functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants completed a syntactic “sentence judgment task” [Caplan, D., Alpert, N., &
Waters, G. Effects of syntactic structure and propositional number on patterns of regional cerebral blood flow. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 541–552, 1998]. The sentences exploited differences between Spanish and English linguistic
properties, allowing us to explore similarities and differences in behavioral and neural responses between bilinguals and
monolinguals, and between a bilingual’s two languages. If bilinguals’ neural processing differs across their two languages, then
differential behavioral and neural patterns should be observed in Spanish and English. Results show that behaviorally, in English,

bilinguals and
monolinguals had the same speed and accuracy, yet, as predicted from the SpanishEnglish structural differences, bilinguals had a different pattern of performance in Spanish. fMRI analyses revealed that both
monolinguals (in one language) and bilinguals (in each language) showed predicted increases in activation in classic language
areas (e.g., left inferior frontal cortex, LIFC), with any neural differences between the bilingual’s two languages being principled
and predictable based on the morphosyntactic differences between Spanish and English. However, an important difference was
that bilinguals had a significantly greater increase in the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the LIFC (BA 45) when
processing English than the English monolinguals. The results provide insight into the decades-old question about the degree of
separation of bilinguals’ dual-language representation. The differential activation for bilinguals and monolinguals opens the
question as to whether there may possibly be a “neural signature” of bilingualism. Differential activation may further provide a
fascinating window into the language processing potential not recruited in monolingual brains and reveal the biological extent of
the neural architecture underlying all human language.